New post on Creeping Sharia

Here is an exclusive excerpt from Chapter Three of my new book, The Brotherhood: America's Next Great Enemy. The chapter is called "A History of Violence" and examines the MB's violent history and role as godfathers of modern day Islamic terrorism.

This excerpt begins with my face-to-face interview in Britain with the grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood's founder. As you'll see, Tariq Ramadan is a formidable and cagey Islamist in his own right who carries on the family legacy.

Enjoy the below excerpt, and you can pick the book up now at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and wherever books are sold from coast to coast.

The man they call "Islam's Savior" appeared in desperate need of one.

Tariq Ramadan, darling of the European Left and arguably the West's most influential Islamist, had just been informed that eight minutes still remained in our interview, which was scheduled to run a full half hour. He looked at me with a nervous, almost pleading smile and checked his watch, seemingly counting the seconds until he could bolt out the door and back into the warm embrace of his effete leftist admirers at Oxford University, where he's comfortably ensconced as a professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies.

At that moment, I imagine Ramadan was wondering how in the name of Allah his handler at Oxford could have possibly scheduled our little sitdown. My line of questioning increasingly centered on his alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and while respectful, I kept probing. I had made the hour-plus trip from London to Oxford to learn more about the inner workings of the Brotherhood from Ramadan—a man who is literally heir to MB royalty—and I was determined to make my time with the notoriously evasive Islamo-spin-doctor worthwhile.

"I'm the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was a fact and is a fact and which is well known," Ramadan told me, barely masking his annoyance. "And even when I was invited [to the United States] by the State Department, this is the way they were introducing me. So, this is something which is known. I'm not a member [of the Muslim Brotherhood], I never was a member—so this is something also which is known."

Yet one needn't be a "member" or formally tied, say, to the Brother- hood's leadership in Egypt in order to promote the Ikhwan's agenda. As we'll see, that's not how the organization operates. For instance, the Brotherhood's former Supreme Guide, Mustafa Mashour, confirmed in a 1998 interview that belonging to the MB is about adhering to a specific ideology and way of thinking—no membership card required. He added that the work carried out by Tariq Ramadan and his brother, Hani Rama- dan, "is totally in keeping with the purest traditions of the Muslim Brotherhood." Likewise, French geopolitical analyst Olivier Guitta has written that, "Most European secret service agencies are convinced that, at the end of the 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood chose Tariq Ramadan to be their European representative."

…

Perhaps better than anyone else alive today, Tariq Ramadan knows and fully grasps the violent legacy of his grandfather. He simply chooses to lie about it—and it works, time and time again. The reason he's able to get away with it is simple. The vast majority of today's Western lead- ers that Ramadan and other slick Islamist spokesmen spend their days hoodwinking flat-out ignore the first rule of war: know your enemy. If you don't believe me, take a poll of both houses of the U.S. Congress and ask members a) Who Hassan al-Banna was and b) What Hassan al-Banna believed and you'll mostly be greeted by blank stares as annoyed Hill staffers try to shoo you away. I've spent a decade in Washington, D.C. and interviewed dozens of lawmakers from states across the Republic. I'd estimate that out of the 535 members of Congress, maybe forty could pass the hypothetical al-Banna poll. In my experience, Democrats are the most egregiously uninformed, but most Republicans don't know enough about our Islamist enemies either. Plus, both sides are crippled by political correctness and a refusal to link Islamic terrorism with the Islamist ideology that inspires it. Because that would require, heaven forbid, a serious examination of the Koran and hadiths—the texts the terrorists themselves cite, time and time again—and how they encourage violence. And we just can't have that, because we all know that Islam is a religion of peace and beyond reproach.

In the House, some of the better informed members are Michele Bach- mann, Trent Franks, Louie Gohmert, and Peter King. The Senate, on the other hand, is a wasteland. John McCain and Lindsey Graham are the Senate's most vocal members on national security, but both are also die- hard interventionists whose policy prescriptions for the Middle East— arming rebel factions and hoping that an acceptable Islamo-democracy emerges—inadvertently help the Brotherhood and other hostile Islamists. Witness McCain's bizarre visit to the notorious jihadist hotbed of Beng- hazi, Libya, in April 2011. Reports were rampant then that the rebel forces working to overthrow Gaddafi were riddled with al-Qaeda types, including some who had fought against American troops in Iraq. McCain, undaunted, encouraged the U.S. government to arm these same Libyan mujahideen, whom he called his "heroes."11 Despite McCain's giddy endorsement, our dalliance with Benghazi's Islamists hasn't worked out so well, if the September 2012 sacking of our consulate and subsequent murder of four Americans there, including Ambassador Chris Stevens, is any indication.In an age when America is waging war—militarily and ideologically—against Islamic fundamentalists, the pervasive ignorance in Congress about the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk is not just unacceptable, it's downright disgraceful. You cannot begin to under- stand al-Qaeda, for instance, without first understanding the history and ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, the organization that spawned AQ and so many other Islamist movements bent on the destruction of the United States.

Which brings us back to Hassan al-Banna. Ever wonder where al-Qaeda, Hamas, and other Islamikaze suicide bombers got their inspi- ration? In his book, Jihad and Jew Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, German author Matthias Küentzel recounts the Brother-ood founder's morbid glorification of jihadi martyrdom, or what al- Banna called "the Art of Death." Küentzel writes:

In 1938, in a leading article entitled "Industry of Death," which was to become famous, Hassan al-Banna explained to a wider public his concept of jihad—a concept in which the term Industry of Death denotes not something horrible but an ideal. He wrote, "To a nation that perfects the industry of death and which knows how to die nobly, God gives proud life in this world and eternal grace in the life to come."

According to al-Banna, the Koran enjoins believers to love death more than life. Unfortunately, he argues, Muslims are in thrall to a "love of life." "The illusion which had humiliated us is no more than the love of worldly life and the hatred of death." As long as the Muslims do not replace their love of life with the love of death as required by the Koran, their future is hopeless. Only those who become proficient in the "art of death" can prevail. "So, prepare yourself to do a great deed. Be keen on dying and life will be granted to you, so work towards a noble death and you will find complete happiness," he writes in the same essay, republished in 1946 under the title, "The Art of Death."